User blog:DoctorBleed/"Goodnight Sweet Princess" Creepypasta Review
Stop me if you've heard this one before: an low-level employee at a production company finds a "lost episode" of a popular television show and discovers it has terrifying and disturbing content. While they watch it, supernatural weirdness starts happening and then it ends on an ominious note with nothing really resolved. A beat-for-beat retread of Squidward's Suicide, just like all the thinly veiled remakes of Sonic.exe and Jeff the Killer out there. What is it with bad creepypastas that are essentially just the same story over and over again? Well, anyway, this particular shameless clone of a glorified spongebob fanfic is called "Goodnight Sweet Princess" and is itself a shameless fanfic of Sonic, just as Sonic.exe was also thinly veiled Sonic fanfiction. So basically we're staring into the abyss right now, except instead of staring back the abyss is trying desperately to avoid eye-contact and hoping we'll go away. The premise of this fanfic is that the narrator works for 4Kids (the internet circa 2007's favorite punching bag) as a translator for the english dub, and has become bitter and cynical over his years at the company, hating his job and even hating Sonic now. I'm making it sound more interesting than it is, it's actually just an excuse for the author to bitch about how much he hates the 4Kids dub of Sonic X and how stupid he thinks modern Sonic stuff is. It takes you right out of the story. Any suspension of disbelief you might have kept despite the ghastly grammar will vanish into thin air the moment the author starts yacking about how annoying Amy Rose is or how dumb 4Kids localizations were. That's an important writing lesson for everyone: don't derail your story just to gripe about stuff you hate. When people say "get your politics out of X" what they really mean is "stop lecturing me." It's even worse here because of being lectured about immigration or diversity or some important political topic, we're being lectured about Sonic The fucking Hedgehog. A major and common critique for these stories is how ridiculous it is that low-level employees are somehow present for things they simply wouldn't have the clearance for and unfettered access to supposedly secret material in multi-million dollar production studios. Wouldn't it be cool if in one of these stories instead of just being handed the secret lost episode tape for no reason, a rogue employee snuck in and stole it? Maybe they run off with the master tape or make a copy of it. Then you could create some tension with the studio getting angry and coming after the guy, trying to cover it up conspiracy style, or maybe the employee has to get the tape back into the studio before anyone notices. Something exciting to spice up the cliche monotony of these stories. Well, in this story, the narrator just finds the lost episode in the trash. The main character even has a good reason to have access to the episode because he's a translator on the show, but that really has no payoff. It's just found lazily plopped in the garbage. Obviously the author didn't care enough about the DVD's origins or backstory to actually come up with a good reason it was there but I'm not gonna call him on it because a prequel story explaining how it got there would be even worse. The main character attempts to play the disc in a regular dvd-player but a thunderstorm causes a blackout. There's really no payoff for this, I guess it's just meant to be spoooooky. So he decides to watch the thing on his laptop, and ends up finding two janky video files. He watches the secret lost episode Sonic X (ooooh! spooooky!) and there's an arguement between Vanilla and Amy about Cream's mysteriously missing father, who apparently died a hero before the events of the series. Yeah, this doesn't sound like fanfiction, does it? It becomes even more like bad fanfiction when Amy starts acting completely out of character and is needlessly cruel to Vanilla about her dead husband. Don't get exciting over this subplot about Cream's absent father. After this scene, it completely disappears. It never pays off, and he's never mentioned again. Cream herself is only given a passing mention and Vanilla is never heard from again. It almost seems like the author started to write in this subplot, forgot about it and just left the now meaningless foreshadowing in there anyway. All throughout the tape, there are brief flashes where the screen turns black and Sally Acorn's face shows up with glowing red eyes whispering vague, cryptic things. Oooooooh! So spoooooooky! I guess I shouldn't rag on these stupid, contrived moments so much. They're the closest the story ever comes to horror. At the end of the episode, Sally Acorn appears in full Sonic X style and hangs out with a character named "Rosey the Rascal." She's just Amy Rose's original design except in the comics she's evil or something? I don't know and I don't care, but apparently the author cares enough to check with us if we actually remember who this character we never heard of in the first place is. The narrator gushes about how "beautiful" Sally looks and how much he loves her. Then the tape starts cutting out and getting all spooky and he starts crying hysterically. I'm not kidding. There's multiple lines about how hard the main character is crying, snot running down his nose, weeping loudly all over a fucking cartoon character showing up and disappearing. It's another great example of the really dumb cliche in these stories of a narrator being way too emotionally obsessed with fictional characters and crying when they get hurt as if they were really people, but with an extra dose of sexual frustration added in. By this point, it's become clear what this story is. It isn't a horror story about a spooky lost episode of a shitty cartoon, it's a thinly veiled rant from the author about how Sega isn't honoring his waifu. Amy Rose sucks and Sally Acorn is the superior girlfriend for Sonic! The story ends with the narrator being horrified that all the files are gone and his laptop's wallpaper has been replaced by a picture of Sally! The finally line of the episode reads "Amy was not supposed to exist. She was created to replace 2@11Y." (Sally) OOOOOOOH! SPOOKY! SPOOKS! This stupid plot twist that means nothing further cements this story as little more than a bad revenge fic against Sega for not including Sally in anything official outside the american spinoff stuff. It isn't scary, it isn't good, and it isn't worth reading. Have Slowbeef read it to you if you're interested, you'll have a good laugh and get to play some video games while it plays in the background. PROS: * There are no pros to this story! It barely has prose! (ba dum tss!) * If anything, a lot of it is unintentionally funny. There are some really funny, stupid lines in this story. Like when Vanilla calls Amy a "moron/idiot" because the author translated it from "baka" but apparently couldn't decide on a synonym. He also describes Sally crying "black, goo-like tears." It gets pretty funny as it goes on. Not quite funny enough to justify it's length though. CONS: * Everything. * The story isn't very long, but it goes on just long enough to qualify for the "At Least It's Short" award. Being short might sound like a backhanded compliment, but brevity really is the soul of wit and a bad story that goes on for too long is like slow torture. * Even though it's funny in parts, it isn't funny enough for someone to enjoy reading the whole way through. It's just bad. Bad bad bad. "Goodnight Sweet Princess" goes to bed with a pitiful 3/10. The extra two points are because I assume the author is very young and doesn't know much better. I refuse to give it anything higher than a "3" though, because it's not a story. It's a shitty rant disguised as a story. Maybe one day I'll get to review a real story on this blog. Category:Blog posts